Friedman, Jonathan. 2002. "Modernity and Other Traditions." Pp.

287-313
in Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, edited by B. M.
Knauft. IN: Indiana University Press.
Ten

Modernity and Other

Traditions
Jonathan Friedman

Modernity is an increasingly popular and confused term of reference,

one that has not been an object of anthropology as such until quite re-
cently. The reason for this is in itself worth discussion. Sociology, of
course, has had lots to say on the issue, and many of the major debates
in an earlier period were very much focused on the issue of the transi-
tion itself and its possible meanings. Gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, status
to contract, tradition to modernity, evolution and development were all
part of a general understanding of the transformation of European so-
cieties and of the world as a whole. The modern in this perspective was
envisaged as a series of states-of-the-world: individualism, market, lib-
erty, and democratic government; brie®y, the model of a society, a civil
society made up of free individuals whose activities were organized
within the framework of a state ruled by an elected government, whose
goals were individual self-ful¤llment and whose alterity implied a secu-
lar existence where religiosity and all cultural identity were relegated to
a private predilection bereft of public in®uence. This notion was not the
product of empirical investigation but of a quite general act of self-
re®ection, one that sought to delimit the speci¤city of an emergent con-
dition. So we are squarely in the realm of identity talk, of categories
that might immediately be designated as ideological or even mythical.
Modernity, like one of its metonyms, the French Revolution, is a myth
of contemporary Europe—a charter of a social order rather than an aid
to its understanding. This is partially true, of course, and it is a major
problem in much of the literature on the subject. On the other hand, we
have taken it upon ourselves in the West to claim analytical distance to

287
 Jonathan Friedman

288
ourselves, to be able to come to a self-understanding via rational critique
and empirically grounded research. This may also be a particularly self-
congratulatory myth, but I shall accept its value for the time being, as
nothing has come along to replace it.
The recent plethora of writings on the subject of modernity, clearly
depicted in Bruce Knauft’s introduction to this volume, poses serious
questions as to what it is we are supposed to be talking about. His cri-
tique of Harvey’s neglect of “economic and political histories of non-
Western peoples—including their engagements with and resistances
against capitalism” is where anthropology can be said to have encoun-
tered this primarily sociological discussion. It might be countered in
good relativist terms that modernity is a product of European capitalist
society, a cultural speci¤city, a “tradition” that is inapplicable to the
understanding of non-Western societies. Now this implies further ques-
tions that have never been asked in a clear fashion. Are the different
Western polities similar with respect to their “cultures?” If so, is this a
product of a common or convergent history, a capitalist history for ex-
ample, producing similar social and cultural transformations? If what is
called “modernity” is the product of these transformations, then are all
social formations subject to the same kind of trajectory? Or might we
assume another more structuralist position in which modernity comes
in varieties, the latter the products of particular historical articulations
of capitalist development in differing initial conditions? This would
produce French, English, and American modernities, as well as Indone-
sian, Japanese, and Chinese modernities. These are big questions that
are not easily assumed or taken for granted in discussing alternative
modernities or alternative relations to a single modernity. They cry out
for more precision, for an elucidating of perspectives rather than yet
another plunge into the murky waters of this discourse.
I shall in the following brie®y indicate what appear to be the prob-
lems that have yet to be solved in such discussions, as well as suggest
what one might be doing in constructing a viable discursive arena.
In the chapters here, as noted by Knauft, there is a virtual grab bag
of terms listed, if not united, under the term “modernity.” Individual-
ism, nation-state, imperialism, and capitalism, whether millennial or
just plain capitalism, are all points of reference for numerous discus-
sions. We shall return to the laundry list since it is not only a re®ection
of the indeterminacy of the term but also has been a symptom of more
theoretical sociological works (Giddens 1990; Friedman 1994:214–27).1
The uses of the term in recent anthropological texts seem to arrange
themselves along a set of varying contours.
 Modernity and Other Traditions

289
1. Modernity is very often de¤ned as the contemporary—for example,
the existence of witchcraft today as an expression of the modernity
of witchcraft (e.g., Geschiere 1997). The latter is modern because it
is part of a process organized within the global capitalist world of
today, not of yesterday. This notion has no particular content, no
speci¤city. It is a mere temporal category of presupposed disjunc-
tion and it is often con®ated and confused with more substantive
understandings of the term.
2. Modernity can refer to the leading sector or region of the world,
understood in hierarchical terms, as a center/periphery structure or
as empire. It includes the center of the “system,” the West and the
Others, the peripheries and subperipheries that are de¤ned and then
de¤ne themselves in relation to the modern. The modernities de-
scribed in this version are primarily relations to a postulated mod-
ern, something that exists in another part of the world, the subject
of either emulation or rejection.
3. Modernity is simply the set of modern products, or the products of
capitalism, the products of the center as well. The latter is present
metonymically, in the form of commodities and images, from haute
couture to CNN or visions of “modern life.” Many write of moder-
nities in other parts of the world as a relation or representation of
or discourse on these metonymies.
4. Our own approach is to understand modernity as a cultural space,
a regime of social experience. This approach is closer to Trouillot’s
chapter in this book and is rooted, of course, in both older and more
recent sociological discussions.

Examples of these usages, not mutually exclusive, are most common

in recent anthropology. In the vast literature on developing areas, we are
usually faced with situations that combine what are assumed to be mod-
ern phenomena in situations that anthropologists are or were wont to
de¤ne as “radically” other, nonmodern, traditional. Thus in this vol-
ume, Foster refers to some of the large body of work that has come from
Papua New Guinea in which money, the state, and other powerful per-
sons, and “development” are interpreted in terms of categories that are
clearly not part of the accompanying baggage of these Western “con-
cepts.” But rather than analyze them emically in the context of local
categories, he instead invokes Giddens’s concept of “trust” as a means
of denoting the points within a social ¤eld where contradictions may
occur. The fear of Lever Brothers soap in Africa . . . rumors that it was
made of human baby fat can thus be compared to the fear of dioxins in
 Jonathan Friedman

290
Coke and milk products in Belgium. But of course, here, the interpre-
tation is based on very different premises. Dioxins are arti¤cial chemi-
cals found in herbicides. They are feared because they represent biologi-
cally deleterious substances as such. The presence of human baby fat in
soap is clearly the product of a different kind of activity linked to an
interpretation of white savagery and linked to the force of evil embed-
ded in this particular process of production. Of course, they are both
just stories, but the categorical assumptions that motivate them are quite
different. This issue is not dealt with by Foster. The question one might
ask here is to what extent modernity and contemporaneity are being
con®ated. Englund and Leach (2000), who go to great lengths in criti-
cizing the notion of modernity in anthropology, demand just this, a
stronger ethnographic analysis, claiming that much of the current dis-
course on modernity in anthropology simply supplants other people’s
categories of experience with our own, or, in their terms, with a meta-
narrative of modernity.2
Similarly, the chapters by Spitulnik and Wardlow in this volume deal
with relations to what is de¤ned by the anthropologist as western mo-
dernity. Spitulnik, writing of Zambia, goes to language use itself and
thus avoids what she sees as the more ethnocentric use of the term
“modernity” as simply progress. She ¤nds a great deal of local variation:
a progress-oriented modernity, a consumption-oriented modernity, a
stylistically oriented modernity, and a temporally clocked modernity.
But in all of the speci¤city, it is not clear that we are talking about the
same kind of phenomenon, as Spitulnik herself notes. Desire for the
things or the life, objecti¤ed in images of the West, does not require the
term “modernity.” On the contrary, it is the analysis of such desire that
can provide insight into the nature of this assumed phenomenon. Ward-
low (this volume) demonstrates clearly the way in which relations to
Western goods reproduce in transformed ways local gender relations
and local interpretations of objects. This is a question of cultural as-
similation, in part or in toto. The things of the outside world are inte-
grated into the life processes of the local social order.
Donham (this volume) links discourses of modernity to the logic of
capitalism. Modernity becomes a discursive space within which repre-
sentations of the modern, the anti-modern, and the traditional are con-
structed in confrontation with one another but still linked to a common
set of properties.

So, what I am calling modernity is, in essence, the discursive space

in which an argument takes place, an argument in which certain
 Modernity and Other Traditions

291
positions continually get constructed and reconstructed. (Donham
2002:6)3

Revolutions are linked to local dreams of progress, images of a future.

He also argues against the usage of the nominal form, modernity—as
opposed to modern, which is a clearer relativizing term.
Donham’s “modern” is equivalent to my own use of the term “mod-
ernist” when he refers to the relation to centers of world power, but he
is, as seen above, aware that modernity is a speci¤c ¤eld of discourse
produced within capitalism, one that leads to his suggestion that oppos-
ing representations might best be seen as complementary aspects of a
single matrix—an approach that I have myself suggested (Friedman
1994). Donham appropriates Latour’s argument that modernity is a
self-mysti¤cation of the fact that “we have never been modern” which
implies that any notion of alternative modernities, must be rejected. Here
he scores important points against the popular image of culturally
determined capitalisms and modernities suggested by Comaroff and
Comaroff and others. He makes an important distinction in this analy-
sis between modernity as a discourse produced within capitalism and
relations among peripheries of the world system and its centers which
represent, for the former, a possible future life, a life ¤lled with the
paraphernalia of those centers, including everything from computers to
democratic ideals.
Donham’s analysis of the Ethiopian revolution is contextualized by
the relations of underdevelopment in which elites are acutely conscious
of a difference that they desire to overcome. Marxism developed as the
basis of antiroyalism, but, more importantly, missionary-imported mil-
lennial Christianity originated a relation to the future that could be
dubbed revolutionary. It is noteworthy that this church was traditional-
ist at home in North America (i.e., against adapting to modernizing
changes). In Ethiopia, it is, on the contrary, modernist. This is no para-
dox, of course, since fundamentalism represents a more general mod-
ernism with respect to economic development, individualism, etc. And
of course it is a product of the “developed world.” What is modernist in
one place may be reactionary in another in terms of internal discourses
of the different places, but fundamentalist Christianity is not, in its
various forms, traditionalist in general, only with respect to certain
forms of social control. Otherwise Victorian morality would have to be
dubbed reactionary, and it often is so dubbed. This is a confusion of
contemporaneity and modernity since the particular degree to which
capitalist penetration dissolves moral and other forms of social control
 Jonathan Friedman

292
and community is not identical to the politics of “progress.” Otherwise,
neoliberalism is as progressive as women’s liberation, and socialist ide-
ology is fundamentally reactionary.
In Donham’s argument, the modern is used as a relative term that is
af¤liated with aspects of capitalist reality. Modern is the way it is in the
center of the system. Here the issue of alternative is less important than
the set of relations within which representations of the future are pro-
duced. Modernity captures the temporal orientation to something that
may already exist somewhere else. His reference to the word, then, is
closer to the notion of modernism, a strongly developmentalist future
orientation. This is the representation of a center periphery relation in
a temporal register, the very core of evolutionary thinking.
In these cases, we must reiterate our question. Is this alternative mo-
dernity in action—that is, the integration of things and images from our
part of the world into their lives? What is the nature of this integration?
The argument for the existence of a global modernity is overturned in
these examples, unless one rede¤nes modernities as the contemporary.
This has been clearly understood by a number of contributors to this
volume. What is the ethnographic situation in which the issue arises? It
is an anthropology that has ¤nally eschewed all attempts to block out
what is not part of the contemporary situation in those parts of the
world that have been incorporated into the Western realm of economic
processes and structures of administration. The latter has often been
admitted only as context, and the anthropological journey has often
been envisaged as a passage from our world into theirs. The last part of
the trip is one that moves from the colonial or Western or “modern”
sector out there into native territory, where true ethnography of the
other can be practiced without the interference of the larger context.4
But once we admit this larger context as part of the ¤eld, are we neces-
sarily including the other in our social ¤eld, our life world, where they
become increasingly like us via increasing contact with the things, con-
cepts, and structures of our world, the virus of modernity?
This perspective represents a strong tendency in the retooling of the
anthropological gaze. Kelly (this volume) infers something of this sort
in his questioning of the very use of the term “modernity,” but his ap-
proach is that of the doctor in search of symptoms. Yes, alternative mo-
dernities are like the alternative civilizations of the last century which
were transferred into the relativistic culture concept of American an-
thropology in this century. Without discussing the facts of the argu-
ment, it is important not to forget the nature of the problem—one that
is more serious than whether we are not reproducing the same old im-
perial categories with each new reformulation of perspective. It is not
 Modernity and Other Traditions

293
enough to identify the existence of the “imperial” gaze. The problem is
the properties of the gaze itself and its pivotal position in all of these
formulations. Alternative modernities assume variations on some invari-
ant theme or set of themes. While in a previous era there was plenty of
free room for the existence of profound differences in the structures of
social life, this kind of difference has been eliminated from the cur-
rent version of the gaze. The anthropology of the colonial and the post-
colonial are among the popular products of the recent change of per-
spective. But in this shift, there has been a tendency to replace the
categories of the people we study by extensions of our own categories.
Otherwise, the question of alternative modernities would not have been
so easy to pose in the ¤rst place.5 This is where the entire discourse of
modernities merges with the discourse of globalization. And it is all still
part of an implicit evolutionary paradigm. Primitive and traditional be-
come a more general expression of radical differences which have be-
come increasingly less radical and have even disappeared into a single
globalized reality.
There are many takes on this, some more historical than others. The
notion that the world is all modern, then, is an expression of an implicit
understanding that we are all part of the same global cultural process.
The alterity of modernities is the result of a new set of mixtures of
previous difference with contemporary sameness diffused now across
the face of the earth. Thus, there is a set of new differences in this
world, but these are not clearly delimited. They are often simply the fact
of colonial and postcolonial administration, of Nikes, of a great number
of social changes that dot what was once a world of more absolute dif-
ference. It is the same kind of alterity that characterizes the difference
between France and England as modern nation-states. It is a combina-
torial modernity in which the alternative forms are all variations on the
same basic themes, “structures of common difference” as Rick Wilk
(1995) has put it.

Whose Modernities?
Alternative modernities are invariably about a certain representation and
practice of a dependency relation, a social construction of peripherality
—but how is modernity understood in the centers themselves? This
must ultimately return us to the earlier sociological discussion, which
was more focused on the content of the term than on its connotative
function with respect to those de¤ned as peripheral to its existence.
This does not mean that the sociological literature offers a solution to
our problem, since it partakes of much of the list, like the nature of
 Jonathan Friedman

294
other discussions. We might begin by dropping the necessary assump-
tion that modernity is a concept and maintain it simply as a word that
has and does refer to a cluster of phenomena that may or may not be
systematically related to one another. I shall suggest below that they do
hang together and that it is in uncovering the nature of the con¤gura-
tion that we can contribute to an understanding of the apparent reso-
nance of the term. We can begin with the list itself (Friedman 1994):
Individualism
Public/private division
Democracy
Nation-state
Enlightenment philosophy/critical rationality
Capitalism
Global economy/imperialism
Modernism/developmentalism/evolutionism
These terms are not of the same logical type. “Individualism” and
“global economy,” for example, relate to different orders of reality, but
this does not exclude the possibility that they might be systemically re-
lated in material terms. A substantial issue in many of the chapters of
this volume is how people relate to the image of the modern, or to the
modern as the empty sign of the world’s centers. But this is a different
issue. It is, as we have suggested, a relation to something that is already
de¤ned as modern—that is, the West and a set of items that represent
the latter. This is a formal rather than a substantive relation. Any item
can be chosen as a subject for discussion, for appropriation as part of
a particular “modern” identity, but the logic that links the terms is
largely irrelevant. The alternative modernities concept is compatible
with the laundry list of terms because they are integrated as signs into
other forms of life, other strategies. The atomization of the list allows a
hybrid approach to the issue, as indicated in Knauft’s introduction to
this volume. Because no logic, no structured ¤eld, is stipulated, it be-
comes all too easy to con®ate contemporaneity and modernity, as re-
®ected in the following passage from this book’s introduction, concern-
ing Robert Foster’s chapter.
Crisp, red, twenty-kina currency notes that depict the head of a
boar now combine ritual ef¤cacy and monetary value. Here is the
antithesis of the colonial exotic that projected native people think-
ing that money was merely pretty paper. Instead, Anganen play
quite actively and consciously with meanings of money and perfor-
mative enactment. They directly engage the importance of cash
 Modernity and Other Traditions

295
with the importance of ritual. The creative fusion of these diver-
gent “modern” and “traditional” elements does not deny one for
the other. Instead, Foster’s analysis reveals a capital ritual in which
becoming healthy and becoming modern can hardly be disentangled
or reduced to a residuum of something else.

Are these two things, traditional and modern, combined in the sense
of remaining separate and contiguous, or is something else going on . . .
ritual ef¤ciency and monetary value? OK, but how are these articulated?
If the schema relating good health and being modern and dependent on
the accumulation of wealth is dominant, then it might be argued that
this schema is structurally similar to former cultural schemes with the
mere addition of new terms. If it can be shown that the schema is a
single structure of integration (i.e., that new elements are assimilated to
the same set of relations), then the issue of modernity is largely vitiated
—that is, if the structure is not “modern.” This also begs the entire
question of the modern as such, but the issue need not arise as long as
the term (i.e., its content) goes unscrutinized. It is in order to clear
up this problem that we need to return to the issue of modernity “at
home,” where the term has, of necessity, come under serious scrutiny.

The Logic of Modernity

Do the terms in the list above have anything to do with one another? I
have argued that, in fact, they are aspects of a unitary process that in-
®ects them all in a particular way (Friedman 1994). The advance of
commercial capitalism generated a dissolution of larger sodalities over
several centuries. This advance itself was predicated on the formation of
a European-centered world market from the ¤fteenth century. It en-
abled a new form of differentiation by wealth in which the individual
accumulation of capital/abstract wealth was paramount. This recon¤g-
ured class structure in such a way that a bourgeoisie increasingly be-
came the most powerful group in society. With the gradual demise of
the aristocratic model of ¤xed status, consumption became a primary
means of social self-de¤nition. The eighteenth century marks the ¤rst
consumption revolution in Western European history (McKendrick et
al. 1982). Lord Chester¤eld’s famed correspondence with his son deals
with the problem of confronting increasing numbers of people whose
status is unclear, because socially unmarked, and the necessity of creat-
ing a personal space secure from public encroachment. The private
sphere emerged in the same period, a sphere of the “négligé” where the
self was free from the imposed and increasingly unclear roles of the
 Jonathan Friedman

296
public sphere. But more importantly, the core principle of this change is
the fracture of the person into a private subject and a public identity.
From this fracture springs the well-known experience of alterity. Al-
terity, the founding dynamic of modernism, is an understanding of the
world in which identity is reduced increasingly to social role, achieved
rather than ascribed, temporary, and even alienated from the subject.
The nation-state is a political formation that depends on the dissolution
of older sodalities and communities and the individualization of a terri-
torial population enabling the state with some effort to resocialize it
into a new kind of identity based on “citizenship” rather than subject
status. Democratic forms of politics make increasing inroads in the
state as the nation/people become the only source of sovereignty with
the demise of the aristocracy. This entire development is dependent in
its turn on capitalist economic growth, which in its turn is dependent
on the formation of larger economic and therefore political arenas than
the territory of the state itself. The formation of imperial systems is the
foundation of the entire development, as it is in the center of empire
that the social transformation leading to modernity occurs. The success
of this process produces a new social identity, one in which the national
society itself is placed within the center of the larger imperial process.
This creates a center/periphery organization of the world, but in the
circumstances of individualization and the disintegration of theologi-
cally based cosmologies such as the Great Chain of Being. If mobility
depends on individual success, the latter can readily be understood as a
process of development. If this modality of experience is transferred to
the larger society and even to nature, the result is evolutionism, the or-
dering of the world in terms of degrees of developmental success. This
is, then, a future-oriented cosmology which becomes generalized to all
domains, natural history, social history, and individual development, and
which is the core of modernism.
This is no mere expression of a relativity, of a contemporaneity that
requires its complementary opposite—tradition, the primitive, or what-
ever. This would be to con®ate the term “modernity” with its speci¤c
cultural content. I shall suggest here that there is a real content to the
notion of modernity, one that can only be understood in terms of a set
of complementary parameters. The latter generate tendencies to the
structuring of an identity space, one in which traditionalism is just as
modern as modernism, primitivism, and postmodernism. All of these
can be understood as expressions of the parameters of the space. The
graphic that I have made use of for a couple of decades (¤gure 10.1)
consists of a number of simple dichotomies that de¤ne four end points,
or polarities. The latter are ideal types that only exist tendentially in
 Modernity and Other Traditions

297

Figure 10.1. The identity space of modernity

reality. Thus, the modernist pole, the dominant in most of the history
of modern capitalism, repudiates both the natural and the cultural as
conceived of, respectively, as libidinous and superstitious. It de¤nes it-
self as rational, universalist, and progressive. The traditionalist pole re-
pudiates nature but not culture, investing itself in the authority of cul-
tural models and in cultural models of authority and social order. The
primitivist pole rejects the cultural as the essence of authority, in the
sense of authoritarian order, of control and repression, and invests itself
in the primordial, creative, and libidinous capacities of “Natural Man.”
The postmodernist pole rejects only the modernist pole, investing in
both nature, understood as the immediacy and creativity of the natural
state, and holistic wisdom as opposed to scienti¤c knowledge. While
postmodernists are primarily modernity’s cynics, primitivists are repre-
sented by many youth movements and pop culture, and in the early part
of the century, by the primitivist intellectual movement. Modernists are
distributed among the rationalist elites, political and economic, and tra-
ditionalists represent the great majority of those who have opted for
roots, ethnic and religious.
If these poles de¤ne the limits of the space, they do not determine its
dynamic, which depends on the larger social and political economic con-
text. The way people identify over time is a function of global systemic
processes. The contemporary period of hegemonic decline is a period of
 Jonathan Friedman

298
increasing polarization within this space, in which traditionalism is
clearly on the rise—and massively so—while modernism is increasingly
weakened. Where the future fades, people tend to invest in the past. The
result is ethni¤cation and cultural fragmentation, at least in the lower
half of the social order. At the top, a congery of modernist and post-
modernist elites become the new cosmopolitans. This represents a cer-
tain folding in upon itself of the identity space, so that modernist and
postmodernist identi¤cations become increasingly fused in spite of
their contradictory natures.6 This is New Age modernism, revolutionary
neoliberalism, and other “doublethinks” so common in Third Way ide-
ologies that have brought political elites from right and left into the
Neue Mitte (the German term for “Third Way”).
If the schema illustrated in ¤gure 10.1 can be understood as a set of
interwoven processes, all of which are dependent on the degree of inten-
sity of capital accumulation and commodi¤cation of the social ¤eld,
then modernity can be understood as a structure in the structural-
ist sense—not a ¤xed form, but a set of properties of a series of inter-
connected dynamic processes. This further raises the issue of historical
conditions, and here I would immediately suggest that modernity is a
transhistorical structure that has appeared in several times and places,
always a product of a similar set of processes of commercial capitalist
accumulation. It can be said to have appeared in classical Greece, con-
tinuing into the Hellenistic, and then Roman eras before disappearing,
but there are also tendencies in certain periods of Chinese and Indian
regional history, and in the Arab world during the Middle Ages. The
degree of individualization and “alterity” has, of course, varied, just as
have other tendencies, such as democracy, the nation-state, rationalist
philosophy, and science. This is related to differing political–historical
contexts. These similarities are clearly worth investigation. Thus, in one
sense, we have certainly never been modern, insofar as these tendencies
have never worked themselves out to their logical conclusions in any his-
torical period. On the other hand, the tendencies themselves are of the
same order, and it is here that we may speak of a family of phenomena
that harbor similar structural dynamics.
Modernity is, in this argument, the cultural ¤eld of commercial capi-
talism, its emergent identity space. This implies that the question of so-
called alternative modernities would have to be reframed. The alterna-
tives within modernity are aligned within the same space of features.
And it is because of these invariant features that we can speak, if we so
desire, of alternative modernities. But this is not the case if the cultural
¤eld is organized in terms of other basic features. Thus, the fact that
 Modernity and Other Traditions

299
one desires Western goods does not have anything to do with modernity
as such. This is emphatically so if the desire itself is structured in terms
of the logic of a very different kind of social world. Cargo cults in this
sense are totally focused on what appears to us to be the modern, but
this ignores the internal order of this relation, the intentionalities in-
volved, and what these objects mean in the lives of those who desire
them. Ethnographic analysis is too often glossed into or replaced by a
ready-made interpretation based on the experience of the observer.
Trouillot (this volume) suggests something along these lines in propos-
ing that modernity lies in the historical formation of a speci¤c kind
of social existence that includes elements such as private life, human
rights, the nation, and alterity, but his stress on this latter term as the
experience of historical rupture is in my terms a partial characterization
that enables him to suggest that the colonial “Caribbean was modern
from day one.” It can certainly be argued that the establishment of slave
societies was an historical process that transferred Africans from their
worlds to a universe constituted by European design and that this was
the creation of a new kind of order in the colonized territories. But the
tendencies toward the realization of a modern cultural space as dis-
cussed above were quite limited, depending on the strength of the
transformative process of a basically dual economy and on the degree
to which other forms of social reproduction could be established or re-
constituted in the periods of economic decline. It is in Europe and other
centers of capitalist accumulation that the process of commodi¤cation,
the deepening dissolution of other forms of sociality, led to an increas-
ingly dominant modernity that is only partially emergent in the histori-
cal Caribbean. Whether the latter quali¤es as a variant of modernity in
the terms referred to above depends on how the threshold is de¤ned.
The latter is arbitrary, of course, as are all de¤nitions, but the issue of
where to place the threshold is itself founded on the understanding of a
de¤nite set of processes that determine the degree to which a modern
identity space has been spawned.
I would suggest that this structural approach might help make sense
of the otherwise quite confused issue of alternative modernities that is
current in anthropological discussions. Instead of immediately utilizing
the term “alternative modernities,” it might make more sense to ¤rst
ascertain the nature of relevant parameters. In all cases that I have en-
countered, the issue is one of confrontation, articulation, and subsump-
tion of other parts of the world by expanding capitalism, and modernity
seems to be taken along for the ride, as if it were part of the baggage
itself and not an emergent product.
 Jonathan Friedman

300

The Ideological Basis of

“Alternative” Modernities

There is an interesting ideology that links the use of the term “moder-
nity” to a notion of historical discontinuity. It is based on the very ac-
ceptance of the evolutionary character of the term, so that to even
insinuate that modernity is a rather restricted phenomenon can be con-
strued as racism. This fear of association with such discrimination has
led to an even stronger bond between “modernity” and “contempora-
neity,” one that is clearly illustrated by recent discussions of the “mo-
dernity” of witchcraft.
Geschiere’s (1997) work on sorcery in Cameroon is an excellent ex-
ample of the problem that arises when applying notions like alternative
modernities. Here, there is an agenda. Geschiere would like to insist
that contemporary sorcery is modern. This implies that all of the prop-
erties of the latter that display some historical continuity are subsumed
within this new category and are thus assimilated to the modern. He
thus creates precisely that discontinuity that has been the hallmark of
Western notions of the modern. What is the same and what is different?
For Geschiere, the objects and actors are different, but the mode of go-
ing about identifying others and the central issue of wealth accumula-
tion and inequality is admittedly part of the “old” logic. However, it is
the introduction of new objects and actors that is crucial. This implies
that potlatching with sewing machines is not potlatching, but modern
potlatching, something entirely new. And what is new is what is intro-
duced from the outside, implying that the “foreign” played no role in
the past. Now if, as in the Congo region, the highest ranked prestige
goods need to be exotic, and if their value is a sign of a political status
relation to the outside world, then there ought always to be a tendency
to import new things into the internal cycles of exchange and domi-
nance. The application of a term such as “modernity” ®attens out a
more complex articulation of different kinds of structure that may in-
deed coexist but which are nevertheless of different orders. This kind of
critique was made of modernization theory by Marxists decades ago.
Geschiere writes clearly that there are “traditional” elements in mod-
ern sorcery after he castigates others for entertaining such dangerous
ideas (2000:23). His modern tale is as follows: X arrives in town without
money to buy food . . . he joins a tontine ( famla) and contracts a debt
that has to be paid by offering one of his kin. “Or si la notion de dette
en sorcellerie n’est pas neuve, elle acquiert de nouvelles dimensions en
étant en rapport direct avec le famla” [“Now even if the notion of debt
 Modernity and Other Traditions

301
in sorcery is not new, it takes on new dimensions in relation to the
famla] (2000:24). What is apparently new is the linkage to the labor of
others, to the capitalist process. But what is changed in all of this? As
he says himself, “le discours de la sorcellerie s’articule si facilement
aux changements modernes” [“the discourse of sorcery so easily articu-
lates with modern changes”] (2000:24). What is new are the new com-
modities introduced by the world market: “biens hautement convoités
parce que devenus les symboles mêmes de la vie ‘moderne’: maisons ‘en
dur’ équipées de frigidaire, de télévision et de tout ce qui rend la vie
moderne agréable; voitures de luxe (Mercedes, ou maintenant Pajero),
etc.” [“highly coveted goods because they have become the very symbols
of ‘modern’ life: solidly built houses equipped with refrigerators, televi-
sions and all that renders modern life so agreeable; luxury cars (Mer-
cedes and now Pajeros), etc.”] (2000:24). What is the real problem here?
Could it be that the term “modern” is being forced on the situation to
be understood? Are these symbols of modern life for those who acquire
them? Or are they symbols of modernity primarily for us? Are we deal-
ing with a notion of modern as we have de¤ned it above, as a structure
of experience, or are these things modern in the sense of foreign pres-
tigious items that demonstrate wealth in a particular local scheme of
representation linking wealth, health, and power? Geschiere answers
this by warning us that to use the word “retraditionalization,” as Chabal
and Dalloz (1999) do, is dangerous because this new imaginary is the
product of “un effort concerté pour participer aux changements mo-
dernes, voire pour les maîtriser” [“a concerted effort to participate in
modern social changes and even to control them”] (2000:225). There is
nothing to indicate that this engagement has to do with the content of
modern life. On the contrary, the “modern” appears in all of his own
and other ethnographic material to be appropriated to other schemes of
interpretation and practice. Geschiere himself admits that the mode in
which the logic of sorcery is applied in the contemporary situation is
continuous with the past. He suggests, in the ¤nal analysis, that it is the
closed/open nature of sorcery, its ®exibility with respect to its objects,
that is its resonant base for modernity.
The argument is often framed in singular terms. We are today in the
modern world, so everyone who is part of this in the material sense—
that is, part of world capitalism—is part of modernity as well. All the
rest is variation on this single theme. This is a contorted version of
Fabian’s call to accept the contemporaneity of the contemporary rather
than classifying it as radically other in the sense of temporally past. But
in Geschiere’s version, modernity is con®ated with contemporaneity.
There is a world of difference between material contiguity and interac-
 Jonathan Friedman

302
tion that is orchestrated by the world system, and the cultural and social
articulations that order such contiguity and interaction in ongoing so-
cial lives. There is no contradiction between material uni¤cation and the
continued existence of separate social worlds, even where they are very
much transformed. The denial of continuity coupled to the assertion
of the radical otherness or speci¤city of the modern expresses a kind
of politically correct approach to difference. Oh yes, they can be very
different—but they are differently modern.
This is the problem in the work of Comaroff and Comaroff as well,
where “occult economies” are associated with globalization, or as it is
now termed, “millennial capitalism.” The occult is a reaction to the
onslaught of the world economy and not a phenomenon that might have
its own internal logic. The enemy here is some straw man notion of
tradition, interpreted as the ¤xed, essentialized culturalist imprison-
ment of the “other” in a local unchangeable world, the world of tradi-
tional anthropology, which at last is being revolutionized by this new
“afterology” (Sahlins 1999). While admitting that there are clear conti-
nuities, the fact that it is happening here and now and in a new context
ordered by the contemporary changes of the capitalist system makes it
entirely different. This is our problem, perhaps, our millennialism, our
desperate need to project ourselves into the future and take “them”
with us, with the feeling that we are indeed entering a new world of
cybercapitalism and virtual accumulation. But this is, in fact, more of
an academic impression than a revolutionary prophecy. After all, even for
those enthusiasts of the brave new world who have boarded the train,
the “revolution” is one made by capital, and not by those who would
oppose it. Capitalism has not changed in its general tendencies to the
deepening of commodi¤cation, the increase in the rate of accumulation
of ¤ctitious capital relative to real accumulation, the increasing lum-
penization of large portions of the world’s population. All these proc-
esses are abetted by the new high technology, but they are certainly not
its cause, and if anything, they are the symptoms of a capitalism in dire
straits, a situation quite predictable from the logic of the system (Fried-
man 1999, 2000, 2001; Hirst and Thompson 1996; Harvey 1989; Wal-
lerstein 1979). If there is something new here, it is the strange air of
radical identity or self-identity among those intellectuals who are both
representatives of the privileged classes and translators of ordinary lib-
eralism into the language of radicalism.
But there is more here than meets the eye. What is it that seems to
embarrass anthropologists in admitting that the world might consist of
mere variations on modernity? It would seem to be the claim that some-
how modernity is about rationality and that magic is therefore some-
 Modernity and Other Traditions

303
thing that belongs to our past and to traditional society. When argu-
ing for the global prevalence of “modern” magic, the African “occult
economy” is merely a local variant of a global millennial phenomenon.
Thus, the driving force in this change is globalization itself, the speed-
ing up of circulation of goods, images, information, T-shirts, and cults:
“it is a feature of the millennial moment everywhere, from the east coast
of Africa to the west coast of America.” They might well stress the local
forms of this phenomenon: “Once more, however, a planetary phenome-
non takes on strikingly particular local form” (Comaroff and Comaroff
1999:291). In one sense, these authors are expressing an awareness that
is very much already present in the media. In another sense, their ac-
count jumps directly from the fact of globalization itself to what are
claimed to be magical reactions. Too much to buy, consumer insanity,
understood as the liberation of desire, and not enough money to get it
all, not for the poor masses. This is what produces the occult economy,
the magic of money, the imagination of zombies, and of sorcery.
This is not a new connection, of course. It is a replication of the old
structural functionalist account, but now in a more intensi¤ed situation
and with, of course, a new, millennial, vocabulary. The old account also
linked the epidemic of sorcery to the inroads of the market into “tradi-
tional” African societies. Sorcery, as Geschiere puts it, is an attempt to
stop the ®ow of globalization. In the old days, it was an attempt to do
something more particular—for example, to counter the commercializa-
tion of social relations. So what’s new, we might ask? A closer account
would have to clarify the fact that it was elders who were accusing their
children or nephews of sorcery as the latter became increasingly inde-
pendent economically as they became employed in the capitalist sectors
that encroached on these worlds, a process that was explosively evident
in the early colonial period. So even the “modernity” of witchcraft has
a historical continuity. Ekholm Friedman has argued that the kind of
witchcraft/sorcery found in contemporary Congo is, in fact, a phenome-
non that dates only to the latter half of the past century—that is, to
colonialism itself, and that before that, it was organized as a chie®y
mechanism of political control over potential revolts by vassals (Ekholm
Friedman 1992). Even while admitting the historical continuity of the
forms of these phenomena, it seems preferable to some, however contra-
dictory, to stress their discontinuity with the past.
The newfangled millennial discourse encompasses the world’s differ-
ences in a new version of theme and variation. The theme now is capi-
talism as a cultural phenomenon. A critique of those who would stress
cultural continuity in all of this7 is revealing with respect to precisely
the contradiction discussed here. We are warned not to retreat into some
 Jonathan Friedman

304
form of old-fashioned localism in order to avoid “the “methodologi-
cal challenge posed by the global moment” (Comaroff and Comaroff
1999:294):
This move is typically rationalized by af¤rming, sometimes in an
unreconstructed spirit of romantic neoprimitivism, the capacity of
“native” cultures to remain assertively intact, determinedly differ-
ent, in the face of a triumphal, homogenizing world capitalism.
Apart from being empirically questionable, this depends upon an
anachronistic ahistorical idea of culture. Of culture trans¤xed in
opposition to capitalism—as if capitalism were not itself cultural to
the core, everywhere indigenised as if culture has not been long
commodi¤ed under the impact of the market. In any case, to re-
duce the history of the here and now to a contest between the pa-
rochial and the universal, between sameness and distinction, is to
reinscribe the very dualism on which the colonizing discourse of
early modernist social science was erected. It is also to represent
the hybrid, dialectical historically evanescent character of all con-
temporary social designs. (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999:294)
Who is the culprit? I seem to have been counted in the category by
Meyer and Geschiere (1999), whose position is practically identical to
that of Comaroff and Comaroff and who participate in their quota of
mutual admiration. In the introduction to Globalization and Identity, I
am taken to task for precisely this awful crime of continuity:
He [Friedman] emphasizes that globalization goes together with
“cultural continuity.” This makes him distrust notions like “in-
vention of tradition” or “hybridization”; instead, one of the aims
of his collection of articles seems to be to understand the relation
between the “global reordering of social realities” and “cultural
continuity” . . . this . . . makes him fall back, in practice, on the
highly problematic concept of “tradition,” which—especially in
his contributions on Africa—seems to ¤gure as some sort of base-
line, just as in the olden days of anthropology. . . . Similarly he
relates the emergence of les sapeurs, to “certain fundamental rela-
tions” in Congo history which “were never dissolved”; as an ex-
ample of such “fundamental relations” Friedman mentions: “Life
strategies consist in ensuring the ®ow of life-force. Traditionally
this was assured by the social system itself.” This is the kind of
convenient anthropological shorthand which one had hoped to be
rid of, certainly in discussions on globalization. . . . Friedman’s re-
version to such a simplistic use of the notion of tradition as some
 Modernity and Other Traditions

305
sort of base line—quite surprising in view of the sophisticated
things he has to say about globalization—illustrates how treacher-
ous the triangle of globalization, culture and identity is. Relat-
ing postcolonial identities to such a notion of “tradition” makes
anthropology indeed a tricky enterprise. (Meyer and Geschiere
1999:8)

The use of the terms “surprising,” “treacherous,” “tricky enter-

prise” in reference to my argument for the continuity of core properties
of life strategies within the global system strikes me as evidence of a
certain terminological nervousness. I do not, of course, make use of the
concept of “tradition” at all. I use the word “traditionally” in referring
to both a colonial and precolonial past. If this makes anthropology a
“tricky enterprise,” it would be interesting to know just how. I refer in
the article they discuss to the way in which, in spite of the destruction
of Congolese polities at the end of the last century under the onslaught
of Leopold’s Congo Free state, the major transformations reproduced a
number of basic structures. This analysis was taken from Ekholm Fried-
man’s work on the subject (1992), which analyzes the way in which
transformation actually works, the way in which certain basic logics of
being and of life strategies remain intact, even in transformation, and
even as the political and much of the social order collapse. This is not in
order to oppose culture to capitalism. It is to ascertain the way in which
different logics articulate with one another over time. If all of these
authors admit that some things don’t change while others do, then we
would seem all to agree, and yet not so. The reason is related to the way
reality is classi¤ed. To see an articulation over time is to stress a trans-
formational approach to historical change. To see in every new combina-
tion of elements something completely new is to stress discontinuity.
Many years ago (Ekholm and Friedman 1980), we suggested that the
global/local relation could be understood in terms of a double process:
the incorporation of local structures into the reproductive cycles of an
expanding capitalist system and the cultural assimilation of imported
relations, categories, and objects into local strategies. We spoke of two
kinds of transformation, one in which local change is endogenously or-
ganized but initiated and channeled by global relations, and another in
which local structures are simply replaced by those from the dominant
power. These two kinds of transformation occur, of course, together, but
it is important not to confuse them. In Hawaii, the native population
was reintegrated into the imported organizations of American colonial
society, from church to school to the entire political structure. Their
whole society was replaced. In Africa, colonial institutions did not re-
 Jonathan Friedman

306
place local political structures in this way, and postcolonial African poli-
ties can be said to have strongly assimilated the imported formal struc-
tures of government. The same can be said to have happened in Papua
New Guinea, where the state, while implementing the categories of
formal Western organization, enmeshed them within local forms of so-
ciality.8 Thus, a district governor could describe his activities in terms
of distribution to relatives, the accumulation of prestige typical of “big
man” activities. Now, of course, big man strategies are themselves an
endogenously structured transformation that might be of quite recent
date. From my point of view, this is not a question of modernity but a
particular articulation of different logics in a particular place. Contem-
porary, of course. Simultaneous, of course. But this does not mean that
people can’t live in radically different worlds of experience, of desire, or
ways of going about the world.
I have myself discussed this issue in a publication with James Carrier
on the subject of Melanesian Modernities (1996). In this context, the
term is simply a way of marking the fact of participation in a post-
colonial set of institutions, but it implies nothing about the way in
which this participation occurs. From this vantage point, it would have
been more adequate to speak of Melanesian Contemporaneities—a
clumsy term indeed, but more to the point. There are many different
ways of appropriating Western products, ways that are not contained
within Western cultural logics. The potlatching with sewing machines
at the turn of the last century referred to above was not a different way
of being modern, but a different way of connecting to a larger world.
The ultimate and very dif¤cult issue here relates to the limits and na-
ture of such differences, and this cannot be solved by simply stating that
people play at different roles in different situations and that therefore
the way to understanding is hybridity. The latter concept entirely misses
the problem of articulation—that is, how, exactly, differences are inte-
grated with one another.

A Confusion of Terms
Let me return now to the millennial arguments. They stress the modern
as hybrid, as evanescent, as unbounded in space and as impossible to
characterize in terms of what Comaroff and Comaroff refer to as the
dualism of colonial discourse. Here is the heart of their argument for
the necessary discontinuity of the modern. The world is one because
capitalism is now globalized. And capitalism is thoroughly cultural, ap-
parently equivalent to modernity, although this is never clearly ad-
dressed. This means that the world is a collection of speci¤c capitalisms
 Modernity and Other Traditions

307
and therefore of speci¤c modernities. In other words, to identify conti-
nuity is to deny the absolute contemporaneity and coevalness of the en-
tirety of the world’s populations.
I am not in favor of reforming language, but it is important to be able
to distinguish among vastly different usages. In order to clarify this for
myself, and perhaps the reader as well, let me suggest the following
categorization:
1. Modernity as the contemporaneous refers to a situation of integra-
tion within the capitalist world economy and to varying degrees
within the capitalist world as such.
The relations to the capitalist world can vary according to the
way in which different populations participate in that world, the
articulation of different structures of experience, different so-
cialities to one another. Being integrated into global capitalist
reproductive process is not equivalent to being dominated by
the capitalist logic. It is one thing to plant cash crops in order to
gain money incomes, but where these incomes are used to buy
pigs in order to give feasts in the context of a big man strategy,
then the local form of accumulation of prestige, while dependent
on the larger market, is not organized by it. Where a big man be-
gins to use his monetary wealth to employ workers instead of
gaining people’s labor via debt and exchange relations, then we
can speak of a tendency to capitalization of social relations.
However, in order to move toward category (2) below, capitalist
accumulation would have to become dominant within the popu-
lation so that the big man strategy became a form of prestige
only, a symbolic expression of accumulated capital. We note that
there is an enormous economy of prestige in capitalist moder-
nity, of course. Otherwise there would be no private universi-
ties, no Rockefeller Center, but these entities are direct prod-
ucts of capital accumulation. The generosity of the millionaire
does not automatically create pressure for reciprocity, indebted-
ness, and social dependency. There are other mechanisms for
that. Where there is a sphere of social reproduction that is not
organized in capitalist terms, external to the capitalist sector,
there is a sphere for the production of other forms of identi¤cat-
ion, sociality, cultural representations.
2. Modernity in the structural sense, as outlined above, refers to the
cultural parameters of capitalist experience space, an outgrowth of
the commodi¤cation of social relations which occurs to various de-
grees in time and space.
 Jonathan Friedman

308
Modernities can vary in terms of the recombination of their ba-
sic parameters and in the degree of their realization. This is
very much a question of historical change. European moderni-
ties represent a set of variants with respect to individualiza-
tion, the private/public division, modernist ideology, and so on.
These variants can pro¤tably be compared to modernities that
emerge in certain elite sectors of the third world, in certain
classes, in China, Japan, and India, and to earlier historical
modernities (in classical Greece, certain periods of ancient
Mesopotamia, etc.). These variations, belong to the same family
of forms because of certain basic tendencies that they harbor. In
all of these cases, I would argue that capital (in the Weberian
sense, below) accumulation is dominant in the social reproduc-
tive processes. This suggestion cannot be dealt with in full here,
but it has been more fully discussed elsewhere (Ekholm Fried-
man and Friedman 1979; Friedman 2000; Adams 1980; Larsen
1976). I refer here to capitalist accumulation that is a process
and that should not be con®ated with any notion of social type.
A social formation can be more or less transformed as a re-
sult of capitalist processes, but the latter is no more nor less
than a logic of wealth accumulation—in the most general sense,
the conversion of money capital or what Weber called abstract
wealth into more such wealth.9 The relation between this logic
and the social reproduction of a particular population generates
tendencies toward what I have described as modernity, but these
tendencies are worked out to varying degrees and in variable
ways insofar as the logic works itself out in different social and
cultural contexts. Since there are no examples of societies that
have become totally capitalized, and since capitalist reproduc-
tion does not dissolve everything, there are plenty of domains
that are transformed without being dissolved and recon¤gured
in capitalist terms. Thus, there are clearly differences in local
and national cultures within formations dominated by capitalist
accumulation. There are large areas of social existence that are
not the products of capitalism, and in this sense, we have never
been modern.

It may be useful to refer to alternative modernities, or whatever term

might seem appropriate, to characterize a particular form of articulation
between peripheral societies in the world system and centrally initiated
capitalist processes. These vary along two axes: one, the degree of trans-
formative integration into the global system, and the other, the repre-
 Modernity and Other Traditions

309
sentations of the center as future, wealth, and well-being, as well as
strategies related to such representations. But the primary sense of the
term, as the identity and cultural spaces of capitalism, refers to the fun-
damental aspects of a particular phenomenon whose parameters have
been the source of the various fragments that are so often compiled in
lists like that referred to earlier: individualism, democracy, capitalism,
alienation. The latter have, in their turn, functioned as metonymic
referents of the alternative modernities described for the world’s periph-
eries. They mark a peripherality that is emptied of cultural content,
wherein the word “modern” is simply our or even their gloss on another
kind of relationship, one that is structured by different kinds of experi-
ence of the world. Modernity in the former sense, however, can be un-
derstood as a kind of “tradition,” a particular cultural con¤guration
with a long history and full of its own magic and fetishism, as Marx
demonstrated long ago. Much of the discourse that I have criticized here
is wittingly or unwittingly based precisely on an opposition between
modernity and tradition. Otherwise, the use of the term to describe the
globalized world has no sense, nothing with which it can be contrasted.
I have argued that this very opposition is itself a product of the logic of
modernity, the logic of temporal differentiation, of development. Those
who so adamantly claim modernity for the entire world are inadver-
tently replicating that which they so enthusiastically claim to escape.

Notes
1. Friedman (1994:214–27) contains a detailed critique of Giddens’s atomistic
laundry-list de¤nition of modernity.
2. It is noteworthy that none of the replies to this article entertain a sustained
critique of just this point. Whether or not the local is constituted, prac-
ticed, stable, or unstable, it is the locus of cultural production via the emer-
gence of habitus.
3. In my discussion of modernity as an identity space, I suggest some similar
terms as parameters for such a space.
4. The critique of this search for the native is not new, of course, and was
the hallmark of Gluckman and the researchers of the Rhodes Livingstone
Institute.
5. It is signi¤cant that while Foster argues for the existence of such moderni-
ties in terms of precisely an articulation of the Western with the indige-
nous, Spitulnik questions the “analytical power” of a term that is so vari-
able in its meaning.
6. The identity space itself is best understood as a topological surface which
 Jonathan Friedman

310
is also variable in form, capable, as indicated here, of folding in on itself in
certain conditions.
7. No names are mentioned, interestingly enough, but the straw man would
seem to be Sahlins, who is one of the few anthropologists to have explicitly
attacked the globalizers.
8. This does not, of course, imply that the transformation is generated by in-
ternal dynamics. On the contrary I would argue that the “big-manization”
process is probably related to signi¤cant changes in regional and global
contexts—for example, the breakdown in the exchange systems linking
highlands and lowlands combined with the introduction of massive amounts
of shell valuables and/or money from the West. On the other hand, the
tendency to the emergence of “¤ghting with food” is probably a much
older process, one that may have well oscillated from such feasting to con-
trol over the ®ow of prestige goods (Persson 2000).
9. This notion is opposed to the generally accepted Marxist notion, which
includes the wage relationship as central. We have argued that the wage
relationship is only one of the possible ways in which capital can reproduce
itself on an expanded scale, one that becomes increasingly generalized in
industrial capitalism but that is not the core of its logic. Following Weber,
I de¤ne capital simply as abstract wealth, which thus provides for a struc-
tural continuity between the various forms of historical capital accumula-
tion. Marx himself is quite aware of this, and it plays a crucial role in his
analysis of capitalist reproduction in its most sophisticated versions, in vol-
ume 3 of Capital and in the Theories of Surplus Value, where fundamental
contradiction of capitalist reproduction is that between ¤ctitious accumu-
lation and real accumulation—that is, the fact that capitalism is driven by
a need to convert money into more money, and the way this simple logic
bogs down in the necessity of passing through production and its realiza-
tion on the market. It would be simpler, of course, to simply speculate. The
logic of mercantilism is the logic of accumulation before it penetrates and
reorganizes the labor process, a penetration that is reversing itself in the
current period.

References
Adams, R.
1980 Anthropological Perspectives on Ancient Trade. Current Anthro-
pology 15: 239–58.
Chabal, P., and J.-P. Dalloz
1999 L’Afrique est partie. Du désordre comme instrument politique. Paris:
Economica.
Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff
1999 Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the
South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist 26: 279–303.
 Modernity and Other Traditions

311
Donham, Donald L.
2002 On Being Modern in a Capitalist World: Some Conceptual and
Comparative Issues. In Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities,
Anthropologies [this volume]. Edited by Bruce M. Knauft. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Ekholm Friedman, K.
1992 Catastrophe and Creation: The Transformation of an African Culture.
London: Harwood
Ekholm Friedman, K., and Jonathan Friedman
1979 “Capital,” Imperialism and Exploitation in Ancient World Systems.
In Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires. Edited
by M. J. Larsen, pp. 41–58. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
1979 Towards a Global Anthropology. In History and Underdevelopment.
Edited by L. Blussé, H. L. Wesseling, and G. D. Winius. Leiden:
Center for the History of European Expansion.
Englund, Harri, and James Leach
2000 Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity. Current An-
thropology 41:225–48.
Foster, Robert J.
2002 Bargains with Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Elsewhere. In
Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies [this vol-
ume]. Edited by Bruce M. Knauft. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press.
Friedman, Jonathan
1994 Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage.
1999 Class Formation, Hybridity and Ethni¤cation in Declining Global
Hegemonies. In Globalization and the Asia Paci¤c: Contested Territo-
ries. Edited by K. Olds, P. Dicken, P. Kelly, L. Kong, and H. Yeung,
pp. 183–201. London: Routledge.
2000 Concretizing the Continuity Argument in Global Systems Analysis.
In World System History: The Social Science of Long Term Change.
Edited by R. Denemark, J. Friedman, B. Gills, and G. Modelski,
pp. 133–52. London: Routledge.
2001 The Paradoxes of Real Existing Globalization: Elite Discourses
and the Grassroots. In Images of the World, pp. 52–65. New York:
UNESCO.
Friedman, Jonathan, and James G. Carrier
1996 [Eds.] Melanesian Modernities. Lund Monographs in Social Anthro-
pology No. 3. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press.
Geschiere, Peter
1997 The Witchcraft of Modernity: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial
Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
2000 Sorcellerie et modernité: Retour sur une étrange complicité. Poli-
tique Africaine 79: 17–33.
 Jonathan Friedman

312
Giddens, Anthony
1990 The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press.
Harvey, David
1989 The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cul-
ture Change. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Hirst, P., and G. Thompson
1996 Globalization in Question. Cambridge: Polity.
Larsen, M. J.
1976 The Old Assyrian City State and its Colonies. Copenhagen: Akade-
misk Forlag.
Kelly, John D.
2002 Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to “Modernity”: Getting
Out of the Modernist Sublime. In Critically Modern: Alternatives,
Alterities, Anthropologies [this volume]. Edited by Bruce M. Knauft.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Knauft, Bruce M.
2002 Critically Modern: An Introduction. In Critically Modern: Alterna-
tives, Alterities, Anthropologies [this volume]. Edited by Bruce M.
Knauft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Marx, Karl
1974 Capital. Volume 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart
1976 Theories of Surplus Value. London: Lawrence and Wishart
McKendrick, Niel, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb
1982 [Eds.] The Birth of a Consumer Society. London: Europa Publica-
tions
Meyer, B., and P. Geschiere
1999 [Eds.] Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. Ox-
ford: Blackwell
Persson, J.
2000 Sagali and the Kula. Lund: Lund University Dissertations in Social
Anthropology.
Sahlins, Marshall D.
1999 Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 5: 399–421.
Spitulnik, Debra A.
2002 Accessing “Local” Modernities: Re®ections on the Place of Lin-
guistic Evidence in Ethnography. In Critically Modern: Alternatives,
Alterities, Anthropologies [this volume]. Edited by Bruce M. Knauft.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
2002 The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot.
In Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies [this vol-
 Modernity and Other Traditions

313
ume]. Edited by Bruce M. Knauft. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel
1979 The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Wardlow, Holly
2002 “Hands-Up”–ing Buses and Harvesting Cheese-Pops: Gendered
Mediation of Modern Disjuncture in Melanesia. In Critically Mod-
ern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies [this volume]. Edited by
Bruce M. Knauft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wilk, R.
1995 Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Differ-
ence. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local. Ed-
ited by Daniel Miller, pp. 110–34. London: Routledge.